Thinking about Iran

A long time ago I spent 4 months in Iran. I remember walking so much and so far every day on the cobbled sidewalks that my arches fell. I remember when they took an X-ray of my foot my brother in law said in the corner of the photo, in Farsi, was written "foreigner". I remember the gold bazaars, where stalls and booths were set up in long aisles. My American boyfriend was happily buying chunks of gold and I bought a golden Turkish wedding ring. I loved taking it apart and putting it back together again. I remember going to restaurants and ordering beer; "obi joe", and seeing the disapproval on the faces of the other customers. Hitch hiking to the Caspian Sea. Singing with my guitar on the top of a car in the desert to hundreds of people who emerged from the sands. Spending two days with a small movie company watching them film. Smoking tarioc. Losing my American boyfriend. Learning phrases in Farsi in the park with the help of Iranian students. Watching Nixon ride down the avenue with the Shaw in a fleet of cars. Seeing posters of men hanged for some political reason. Buying flat loaves of hot bread called "noon" on the street in the morning. Drinking tiny cups of tea with a sugar cube between my teeth on the sidewalk. Jumping over the jube. Watching children hammering metal plates with their fathers. Crying over women and children begging. Listening to people recite poetry for me in the park. Trying to wear a chedorah correctly. Sweating and panting at night in the terrible heat. Staring at the red and blue lights inside the giant fountains of water. Taking taxi's down Abu Rayhan and shouting "dasta chap dasta chap!!!" to the driver. Learning how to walk across the crazy traffic on Abu Rayhan. "Pretend you do not see any cars coming. Step out and look the other way as you cross. They will stop." Visiting middle class families who had layers and layers of carpets in their homes. Visiting rich Americans who worked in the oil industry who had indoor swimming pools and teams of servants. Watching my brother in law tending his tiny patch of grass in the enclosed space behind his house. Going to Gom, the extremely religious city of gold, and not seeing a single human being because they all remained hidden while we were there. Going out with Ali, an artist at the Iran Journal newspaper, who had a vague understanding of the English language and often wrote,"make love not war" on his drawings. Not understanding the enormous differences between American and Iranian cultures. Falling in love with everyone. Wanting to stay forever. Not being allowed to renew my visa. Getting on the wrong plane and ending up in Syria. Never knowing what happened to Ali. Wishing for decades that I could return. And still cooking rice, chelo, the way I learned to in Iran.

House of Stone Version 10 point 8

I am always cheered by the fact that no matter if I write about Abraham Joshua Heschel, or the Holy Rabbi of Brooklyn, or Einstein, or my mother Ruth Stone, or Korean Drama's and British actors, someone across the world in Israel checks in to see my blog. Maybe, I think, maybe it is my uncle, my fathers brother who lives there. But he only reads the Talmud and the Torah so I don't think it could be.  Anyway, one person in Israel, one person in China, one person in the US, and my little crowd in Poland. That is a cozy group, I think. An odd but cozy group. And in these High Holy Days, what more could one hope for? I am cheered by a mass mailing from a Rabbi in Chabad who wrote that he hoped we would all be sealed in the Book of Life.
    Tonight I am watching "Emperor", with Matthew Fox, who was in LOST. It starts out with a little bow to Lost by showing Matthew Fox in a forest of Bamboo, just like the beginning of Lost, only he is smiling and standing up rather than lying flat on his back having fallen out of a plane. I am only a half hour in, but I had to pause it because my son called me from Oregon and we ended up talking all night. He showed me how to Google Video Chat and how to add family to my google family circle. He showed me how to find his original music on SoundCloud. It was all very illuminating. Although I would rather have my family in a real circle around me, it is the best one can hope for in these digital times. I was thinking how these days people don't have piano's or books or even photo albums in their livingrooms. They have Itunes, or kindle or SoundCloud. The have SnapFish or Iphoto. Matter is disappearing and our world becomes more and more internal and ethereal. We have our online family circle. We have our online music and pictures and relationships. Our stores are online. Almost everything is neatly organized in an invisible area, called digital storage space. If it keep going as it is going, I think the next step is for us to move in to the computer completely. We will end up living in Cloud. And aren't we almost there anyway? Our relationships are more and more invisible. Perhaps we will drift to a dimension where slipping inside the computer will be possible. Perhaps we are already in it. Perhaps we are being led to this awareness, carefully but briskly being led down the rosy path to acceptance that it is, and has always been, all virtual.
Even so, May you have a sweet and uplifting year. May you be sealed in the Book of Life. May you return if you wish, or retire from the wheel if you choose, or float across all 10 dimensions on the very latest version of your Cloud.
     Now I am going back to watch the sad movie Emperor, about Japan after World War 2. I feel if Sugihara was so Holy as to save so many in Lithuania when no one else was helping, the Japanese must have have had a great deal of goodness in them during that wicked heartless era. Surely Sugihara and his children and whole family are sealed forever in the Book of LIFE. May we all be so honorable and brave.

HOUSE OF STONE Best Actor in the World Awards

Protect the Boss was cute, ended cute, overall cute rating 8. The father was a fantastic actor. He really was good. In fact, the father and the grandmother stole the show. And the poor little rich girl too. She was great. But now it is finished. I tried watching Flower Shop Boy or whatever for the 3rd time and I still HATE it, too bad, cause I loved the main guy in it when he was Death in 49 Days. 49 Days is what started this whole obsession. So I was trying for the 3rd time to wade through the Flower Shop series, but I just couldn't do it. One has the feeling that probably buried in there are some great moments, but the idea of a teacher and a student is kind of weird to begin with. And its about high school which is another turn off for an ancient alien relic such as I am.
God, can I SAY that? Why not? Most of my readership is Polish, believe it or not, and I am sure over in Poland they don't mind what I say. If it is not too personal a question though, WHY is my blog read in Poland? I don't mean to say I am a big hit there, just that more people in Poland read my blog than anywhere else in the world. Which, despite the modest numbers, means a lot. Is it because I wrote about Einstein so much? Or Rebbe's? I just am not sure. My daughter's boyfriend is half Polish. But what else? Surely there are no Koreans living in Poland. I am always hoping a Korean or Polish person will read my blog and comment. Actually I am always hoping anyone will comment. But now I sound like I am begging..... je song hamida. ("I'm sorry" in Korean)
     We were chatting about Korean Dramas. I finished Protect the Boss and was surfing for a new series to watch. I have lots of Korean movies lined up but I am too hooked on the series format to watch something that only goes on for an hour or two... Although I did like Castaway on the Moon just because the nutty girl was so wonderful.  Oh did I tell you I watched Romantic Island? I love that Lee Sun Kyun. Why, if I can drift a bit here, does he change his name so often? He is hard to locate on Netflix and on the web because he changed his name several times through out his career. Or maybe people just misspell it. I probably misspelled it here. Anyway, I gave him the "House of Stone Best Most Adorable Actor Award" for this year. It had previously gone to Bill Nighy for anything and everything he has ever done and will do in the future. Before Bill Nighy the House of Stone Award went to the actor who played Jodah Akbar (which I am also probably misspelling). That movie changed my life. Not actually, but internally. I began to buy silk chiffon fabric and hang it in doorways, I listened to Sufi music all day, especially that one song at his wedding where the Sufi's swirl and Johdah Akbar begins to swirl too and he sees God, or Allah or Hashem or whatever name you prefer, and the silk chiffon around the females tent swirls and blows in the wind. It was a most moving cinematic masterpiece. Like the Life of Pi. That was also one of the GREATS. But who knows what lies ahead? My life has paused and the television screen flickers on, and on, and on. Not only am I now a simple watcher, but my brain has acclimated to it's new function and offers little in the way of thought or comfort. It forgets words. It fails to recall books we read. It doesn't like to be awakened except when I say, "Want some Lime Tostitoes?" to which it replys, "Sure! Go get some!" or when I ask, "Are you tired? Shall we turn off episode 4 and go to bed?" and it will say, "Ok. Let us retire."
     We were talking about Korean Dramas. I tried one about a time traveling guy called,  Operation Proposal and after 1 and a half episodes I was not getting in to it just because it was about teenagers, and the main guy in it looked 14 at the most. Which is not to say it was bad or boring. It was just for a younger audience I think.
     I am now in episode 3 of Heartstrings and I really like it. I really like the leading actress, Park Shin Lee.  I also really like Strawberry Ritter Chocolate bars. Do you know Ritter Candy makes lots of different chocolate bars, most of them are available almost anywhere, except the one I like. The strawberry chocolate bar is available at a few grocery stores in Brooklyn and was for sale last December in Target of all places, but is otherwise unavailable on the planet. It's the best chocolate bar I've ever had. It's better than Godiva, better than Lake Champlain chocolates, better than the weird modern chocolate made with things like pepper and chili and shoe leather. God the things chocolateers come up with! Now that is a word I think is perhaps not correct. Chocolateers? People who make chocolate are called.....not volunteers. Not rotisseries. Not confectioners. Well, anyway, my brain took the bag of lime Tostitoes and disappeared upstairs. I think it may have gone to bed without me. It likes to fall asleep watching Richard Dreyfus movies on the old VCR. Sometimes it talks in it's sleep. It says, "that was a second encounter!" It says, "I can't be a World Citizen! I'm not FROM this solar system." It mumbles. Last night though, when I had set the alarm and was turning off the light, I said, "Are you still awake?" and my brain whispered, "dayyy" which means "yes" in Korean. Which means it may actually be learning something from all this passivity.

Camsahamida Netflix for bringing Korean drama to the USA!

 I have been watching Protect the Boss, which I loved for the first 8 or 9 episodes. I regret to say it has become more than a little redundant and reminds me more of old American soaps than any of the other Korean Dramas so far. I am going to see it through to the end, but here's what I am thinking....There are two or three evil older women in it who are constantly meeting in secret to think up something evil to do. That's kind of depressing. And the characters in the show are less enchanting. The main young man who carried the drama for the first half was adorable and innocent and had phobia's which were very endearing, but there is too much physical abuse for my taste. The girl he likes is constantly twisting his arm or slapping or punching him for liking her. It is obvious his father hit him through out his childhood because he cringes every time his father is near him. The father's mother also hits the father and threatens to break his legs, though she is the kindly one of the whole family. All in all, it is tedious and lacks interesting characters and dialogue to carry through however many episodes it is... I am still watching it. Yes, there are times when it is funny. The father is the best actor without a doubt. The son is good too, though his character is not given enough good lines as the show progresses. It falls back on fight scenes more and more. I do like the main girl and the dumped beauty, just because they are in opposite roles. The main girl is not beautiful, though she has a beautiful figure, and she slouches and her aggressive behavior is weird. I like the unusualness of that set up, but I am sorry she is so unkind to the main son while helping him. The other main young man could have been much much more interesting but they give him so little to work with. He has to do all his acting with his facial expressions because he rarely says anything of interest. The crying rich girl does her part well and is increasingly special. Unfortunately the "wrestler" girl is given a typical role to play. She has to be thuggish and mostly interested in overeating. But you get the feeling this girl could probably be a wondrous character if she was given a great role.  I wish TV would have a positive big female once in a while. Not mean or tough or indifferent, but actually a wonderful human who isn't skinny. But maybe I want too much from the world.

     Every single Americanized movie or show has three constants. The first is violence. Usually someone is about to get murdered, or has a gun, or is planning something dangerous. There is usually a shoot out, the bad guys shooting badly and the good guys killing left and right in order to save someone or do some good in the world. A total oxymoronic constant. The second "must be included in every movie" is a sex scene, usually five minutes after the two people meet, and it is always the same and it is always stupid and steamy and utterly unrealistic. In my opinion (and really I am NOT a prude.) I think watching a bedroom scene in a movie is SO dull and kind of repellant. Do people REALLY like to watch other people naked in bed together? I just don't see how it is so important to include the same thing in every major motion picture. I don't think it's WRONG or DIRTY or wicked, I just think it's boring. And they always make the same boring noises, and you see the same naked shoulders and hips and blah blah, get over it. In the last few years they have added a lot of sticky audio to kissing too which really turns me off. Why do people like to watch other people being intimate? It's such a cop out to character development.
The third constant is of course, the car. The car is being pursued. The car is pursuing. The car can do almost anything, even fly if you are watching anything with Nicholas Cage in it. The car spins, rolls over, falls off a cliff and bursts in to flames. The guy and girl crawl out, unscathed, and are able to shoot their pursuer just before they begin fondling each other and have sex.
     There are over one and a half million people in the United States who are producers, directors, and actors. You would think, with all those people making movies, that they would come up with story lines that did not revolve around car chasing, shootouts, and sex scenes. ( ok, notwithstanding independent films about the Aboriginal tribal whatever....) In Korea, at least in Korean Drama, they have managed to do just that. There have been car scenes, but they are not heroics set up to make the main guy appealing. There have been a few guns in some of the dramas, but they are not shoot out scenes set up to turn the leading man into the hero. In Korean Drama, they let the leading man turn himself in to a hero, with his acting skill and his character, and his flaws. It is the differences, the individuality of the people that take their filmmaking to the top of my list. In the current American TV drama Person of Interest, the character "Harold" is enthralling in a similar way. His peculiarities are what make him so appealing; his limp, his inability to fist fight, his dislike of guns, etc. I remember going to a screen writing workshop in NYC some years ago and hearing how the writer should make a list for each character of things he says and does and wears and carries that make him that character. I didn't think much of it at the time because the speaker used, as an example, the movie Jerry Mcguire, explaining to the full auditorium that this was one of the best movies ever made. I could hardly wait to get out of there. I thought Jerry Mcguire was a perfect example of real garbage. I didn't think a single line in it was original or fresh or worthy and the story was unmemorable but I remember I hated it. Anyway, that speaker was spot on about developing characters. A list of what they are like. What they say. Like Hugo in LOST, said "dude", loved food, wore enormous teeshirts, listened to awesome music on his headphones, and was humorous even when he was suicidal.
           Sometimes I give Korean Drama a break and watch something else on Netflix. I watched an episode of the British TV series House of Cards, I watched a Netflix mini series called the Prisoner (with the guy from PERSON OF INTEREST in it), I watched an episode of the American version of House of Cards (yikes! Sorry Netfix!). But nothing lately holds my interest other than these strange, wonderful, hilarious, tragic, emotional Korean Dramas. It's a phenomena, right?

Korean Character in Dramas

You Are Beautiful... Another addicting Korean Drama. But how could she continue loving that turkey of a guy episode after episode? Ok he was very cute, but so wrapped up in himself, and with such a wicked mother. But then how could she leave him after he stood on stage talking to her and found her in the crowd of 15 thousand screaming fans? That was a great scene. That was the scene the audience waited for, waded for through 16 episodes. What an awesome scene. So erotic. But then what? After something so terrific as that, what else is there? The mundane day to day life that inevitably follows is too disappointing to think about. So in a way she has to leave, this nun turned boy turned pig-rabbit turned woman. She has to leave otherwise we are left only with an ordinary couple.
     What I want to know is why do they use so much english? And why is there so much catholicism?
    Well, the long week-end is over. You are Beautiful is over. The morning pushes on, and it's time to go back to work. Forget the glittering world of television. Let go of the lives of all those others who exist only in the dreamworld. Work. Work to forget. Work to make money. Work to pass time. Work to remember you are human, regardless of where you were born, you are human... and existence is enough of a drama, subtitles or not.
     PASTA, the Korean Drama about a girl who wants to be a chef and a Chef that hates girls in his kitchen, REAL acting suddenly appears on the screen in episode 10 and knocks you off your feet. Yoo Kyung is one of the most convincing actresses I have ever watched. Her character is awkward, childlike (almost overly so, but not quite), and somewhat plain. She is told over and over by Chef that she is not attractive. Ugly, he says. Her face is full of expression, her body movements are exactly right, and her joy is contagious. Sorry, that is a oh so corny remark but it is true! It is true, you must watch this soap. In episode 10 Hyun Wook, (real name Lee Sun-kyun, the worlds most adorable sensual powerhouse of an actor) tells Yoo Kyung (the worlds most adorable, childlike, strong female lead..her real name is Gong Hyo-Jin)  that he likes her. And in these few minutes where she sits on his cutting table and he bends over her, the emotions and facial expressions and acting is absolutely REALITY TV. It could not be more real. In fact, I keep wondering if they are really who they are portraying. These two carry the show, along with the restaurant owner who also acts well, though his role is more quiet and his love unrequited, and Yoo Kyung's father who plays a small but beautifully done part.

Can I gush anymore? Are these people famous? I know they are famous in Korea, but what about in the U.S.? 

 These shows all use odd real type people. You don't need to hear an actor repeating the same word, or wearing the same shirt to know their character. They stand out and are memorable because they are not perfect to begin with. The leading girl doesn't wear lip gloss in PASTA. The female cook who gets fired kind of has a Roseanne aura, chunky and angry. (She turns up again in Protect the Boss, another FANTASTIC drama I'm in the middle of now.) Sometimes people look disheveled, really look it. In US movies a person might say, "wow you look terrible! what's the matter?" but in truth, the other person doesn't look terrible at all... they look spiffy and perfect but maybe they're frowning. Korean Drama lets you see as well as hear. The story is not in perfection. It is not about perfection. The scenery is refreshingly dumpy at times. The cars aren't all perfect. The imperfections make it. and the fact that you can watch 20 or more hours of one drama without having to see people copulating in order to know they are in love is...well... it's just way sexier. I love how you grow to love each character because you get to see such interesting scenes that may not be directly related to the plot but they add tremendously to the story. It's like listening to a folk tale. It's rich stuff. And grown up people are important. They aren't people to avoid like in this country, they are the center of the family. The grown kids listen to them. They have this respect shown to them. Honorifics. "Yo" at the end of a sentence. Bowing. And a meaningful place in the group. A person watching this yearns for that kind of acceptance and inclusion in the familial group. A person watching these Korean Dramas may feel we have sacrificed too much in our loss of formality and tradition, trading it for independence which teeters on isolation. 

Bing-Bong, Shin, Jung, and I can't find my Shues, Darn It

             Great Korean Drama Lines, and other sound bites
"Can't you see I am blushing?? Can't you hear my heart beating wildly?" Shin Mi demands, pulling away from the arms of Suk Bong.
"No," says Bong, confused. "But I can certainly hear your shrill voice..." (Becoming a Billionaire)

Peculiar hang ups in Korean shows
#1:    Americans don't have an aversion to bathroom humor per se, sometimes it turns up in movies but not often and it is never overt. Not so in Korean TV. They not only have person-on-toilet shots, complete with rolls of toilet paper and narrow stall, but they talk about it in almost graphic detail. There is even audio. Which makes me wonder, are we watching because we ENJOY what we see or are we watching because the creator of the show enjoys filming what we have to see? Is this a supply out of demand sort of thing? Or is this how-far-can-I-take-realism sort of filmmaker thing?
#2:    Let's revisit the repulsive food shoveling shots... watching Bu Tau_ (can't remember her full name) eat whipped cream cake is not so very terrible. I sat thinking, is she really having to eat this or are they making it look like she is swallowing but she is really spitting it out off camera? And I was thinking, is it low calorie Cool Whip ? Surely she couldn't really be eating half a whipped cream cake every show or she wouldn't be able to squeeze into those darling little glittery tee shirts she wears as dresses. Anyway, her cake eating is a necessary part of the storyline. She was a fat child because her father didn't give her enough love or time. He gives her money instead of love. So when she is upset, she eats. We all know eating sweet stuff is a temporary replacement for love. BUT, when the gross man (who mysteriously knows everything about everyone) eats with his mouth hanging open in every episode, the audience might not feel it is carrying the story along. The audience might actually think it is discouraging viewers from watching. I certainly find myself turning away.
      Koreans kind of have an honesty in their shows that is lacking in the western world. I guess gross behavior is part of that, but I wish we were not subjected quite as often to it, especially since I have a 36 inch screen and a mouthful of seaweed dripping down a smeared greasy face is rather startling in HD. It could be that I would not be so offended if I took my TV's picture control off High Definition and Wide screen.

     #3: Having never heard a discussion about menstruation in any movie or show before, I don't know how to judge and maybe I ought to leave the topic for another time. Suffice to say no bodily function subject is taboo in K-Drama's except maybe sex, which is fine with me. I've already expressed how I feel about voyeurism. There's nothing less appealing to me that watching copulation or anything close to it if it is not me. If it's you and another somebody, great. Just not in front of me.  

     One GREAT thing about KD is that no "bad Guy" is ever just a bad guy. The reason they are bad comes out in the story and you begin to feel great compassion if not warmth toward the bad guys. No one is ever all good either. They have their yucky sides. They say mean things sometimes. They are rounded out full characters and the audience is not forced to like one and hate the other... you are sort of sitting in mild judgement through out 18 or 19 episodes... You can't decide if you want Bong to love the chilly heiress or the fit-throwing heiress. And as for the fathers! Which father would be least gruesome for Bing Bong to discover is his real dad? The one who steals? The one who hires thugs to wreck lives? The one who is so stingy he doesn't mind when others suffer? Or the one lying comatose in the hospital who has lost most of his brain? It's a dilemma. So you watch, and you watch, and you watch, until you begin to dream in Korean at night. And you can't understand what is being said in your dreams....until someone kindly turns on the Subtitles located just under your pillow. And your dream even has a name. "Bing-Bong, I Can't Find My Shoes Darn It" only the word SHOES is misspelled Shues. It makes no sense, but dreams are like that...

The Unsavory Side of Korean Drama

This week end I am watching Becoming A Billionaire, another Korean Drama. The subtitles are not quite as good as the other dramas I've watched, and I notice it is not DramaFever made. I don't mind so much that the typist often forgets a letter here and there, but it is almost impossible to see some of the dialogue at times because the yellow print is too light for the scene and mostly because there is Asian writing beneath it. I guess it is also in Chinese or Japanese. They need to fix this issue and make the text visible to the audience who can't understand Korean. But I am grateful there is a translation, even imperfect.
I am picking up a few words here and there though, despite the fact that the most mundane words are almost never said the same way twice. Maybe the translator is just simplifying everything too much. You hear 60 seconds of a character speaking Korean, and on the screen it says, "OK. sure." and you KNOW that's not what they said, but what can you do? You can't call someone and complain. You just live with the dumbed down version.
    Having watched 49 Days, My Fair Lady, Secret Garden, Padam Padam, and a few others, I know Korea is a macho culture and I have no complaint with that. In truth I sort of like it. But in this current drama I am getting an uncomfortable feeling. The two main characters keep playing a childs game where the loser gets hit in the forehead. And the girl keeps losing to the guy who almost kisses her, but then hits her as part of the game instead, and she walks around with a big dark bruise on her forehead. I was shocked by this, because beneath the game is of course sexual tension, and the result is a woman who has been flirted with...but who has actually been struck in the face. And that is not sexy. That is not cool. That is not entertaining or charming or cute. It is the opposite of all that. It is more repellant than the close up shots of people chewing too much food. The Korean culture must have a thing for mouths jammed with food.  They show a lot of sloppy chewing and smeared food on the face. There is actually audio of stomachs rumbling in hunger. Sometimes the cultural differences are interesting and strange, and sometimes they are upsetting and infuriating. Food dripping out of the mouth is tolerable. Bruised girl is NOT.

The Deep Significance of Korean Drama, sorta

I write this blog as sort of a conversation. In an isolated existence, one has to have someone to confide in, and since I don't even have my cat anymore (Russell got removed rather roguishly by Rosa Mimosa), I speak to the blog. "Blog," I say, "Remember when we only watched comedies?" Blog listens. "Years of Richard Dreyfus and Dan Akroyd and Dudley Moore. And then we transitioned to thrillers, spy movies, Russell Crowe and Michael Caine..." Blog is attentive. "Alias was great...then the supernatural took over. I guess it went from Alias to Lost, and from Lost I went koo koo over anything supernatural. I still think LOST is the best television show in history to date. Every actor was sublime. Every phrase, every spoken word was memorable. Every character was to die for... Not just Jack and Charlie and Sawyer but Hugo and Jin and the adorable grumpy Korean guy who I can't remember his name, he might have been the best of all. And his father! And all the women. Lost is unbeatable. But after several years of constant supernatural, I drifted. It wasn't intentional..." Blog remains silent when I say this... "You don't believe me? I tell you, it was a natural occurrence. Oh wait, I forgot Jewish historical movies and documentaries. Yes yes! That's when it happened! It was the Korean guy in Lost, then watching every documentary on world war two Jews (like Resistance, the Bielsky Brothers...)that I could find until I came upon "Sugihara", the Avatar Hero who saved 3 thousand Jews from the death camps by giving them visas to Japan. OK, so Japanese is not Korean. But it's close. When I lived in Europe everyone called me Canadian. I didn't mind. I don't speak French and I am not Canadian but it was close enough, right? And I was already following Miles, aah yes, Miles was his name in Lost. I was already following his acting, and drinking up PERSON OF INTEREST because he was in it with the ASTOUNDING actor Michael somebody who played Ben Linus on LOST. Drift drift.... I just have to say this Michael guy speaks with the grace and depth of old fashioned royalty. Despite playing beside the whispering dark superman guy, Michael is the one my daughter and I swoon over. His presence is electric. I'm way too old to swoon but my 28 year old daughter is a testament to his adorableness. I even loved him as Ben. Michael Emerson is his name.  So anyway, I am hooked on Korean drama." I stop typing for a moment to let all this information sink in. Then I say, "Where was I? Oh, yes, Padam Padam, the onomatopoeia title that means "the beating of two hearts as one", a 20 episode K Drama with DramaFever subtitles, about a rough guy who is dying of cancer and a girl out of his class. I don't see the class difference, frankly. The upper class girl has a total thug for a father who beats young boys at the drop of a hat and spits on everyone he doesn't like... he's a really gross character and if he is supposed to be the upper crust then gee whiz... The main girl is chilly, almost without character, but the dying guys mother is INCREDIBLE. She dresses and looks poor. Korean drama is SO realistic in some ways. The characters really do look like what they should look like... the rough guy dresses in rough lower class clothes, the mother is chubby and without grace... It makes for a much more compelling show when the people look the part. May I just say in the USA movies the poor people are never really poor looking, they never behave without hope, they just don't seem poor. In Padam Padam the mother sells fish on the sidewalk with her competitive neighbor. At night, she talks with her dying son about how impossible their lives are. OK so the mother shouts everything, you might want to turn the sound down, she shouts so much, but the poignant moments between mother and son, when they cry and cry and cry over his terminal illness and his unfair prison term and their inability to fix any of the wrongs in their lives, those moments are academy award winning raw honest insights into the lives of most of the world living on the edge of despair. Wait, is the Academy for movies and Oscar for TV? or is Oscar for Broadway? anyway, I am not saying that every moment of this new genre I have discovered is brilliant... it is soap opera, and often tediously repetitive in the storyline. There are inconsistencies... the mother says to the doctor that she can't read. But later she is texting GookSu. But the REALNESS that comes through with average looking people, not instantly-beautiful main stars (they become beautiful as you grow to love them...)  hilarious remarks making fun of themselves/the show, (The guy who is part Angel in Padam Padam says in dismay when the feathers fall off his wings, "What will my father say? I've become a mutant featherless chicken.") these are what draw me again and again. (BTW, the most endearing sweet, sad little baby is a bright star on this show.)
Yes, I wept when the dying young man and the veterinarian girl he's in love with have a brief argument which fills the dying young man with anguish and regret, and she soothes him by saying "You're attractive when you're being mean to me.." it is both hilarious and heartbreaking at once, and she pats him while he shakes from the pain of cancer, and her patting is the same as when he lay in his mothers bed and his mother patted his back while he sobbed all night, not wanting to die. Despite their over-the-top storylines, Korean dramas strike at the deepest issues of the day; The anguish of living and dying, the unfairness of life and the inability of one human being to fully know the pain of another. It contains the ugly and the everyday. It is a venue for the modern times when we are all on electronic equipment skyping with those we love rather than sitting together singing and playing guitar under the night sky. This is a new kind of entertainment...different from the old soaps where murder and affairs and secrets strung us along, the glue being more about deceit and falsehood than anything else. These Korean shows are dramas for a world wide generation that does not get close enough to others to begin to express their loneliness and confusion. In a world where we long to be appreciated and loved, money is not the medicine. What these dramas convey is the anguish and hurt of a generation lost in the very big crowd, a generation who needs to feel and to express their darker feelings, but living in the flat screen of FaceBooks superficial friendships they do not dare do more than yearn for more "likes" and "comments" to assuage their starvation for a humankind existence. We live in and through machines. For the young, this is all they have ever known, and for that we should all weep."
   Blog doesn't answer. Blog fell asleep.

Crying in Korean

I am not sure which began first, my job taking care of an ailing personality during the days, or my obsession with watching Korean soap operas. I think the job came first, and with my first paycheck I bought Internet service, connected to Netflix, and began to watch a show called 49 Days. I fell in love with Jung Il Woo, who is 4 years younger than my youngest daughter, but never mind, he was beautiful, elegant, humorous, and his face full of expression without much movement.... I mean, he did not have to frown to look angry, or open his mouth to look surprised. He played the part of Death and you never saw such crying in your life as there was in 49 Days. The adorable main girl (who was partially a ghost) cried constantly over her father, her fiance, her life, and the fact that she was in a coma.
 After he stole the show as Death, I was surprised he lost the girl to Yoon Sang Hyun in the next drama I watched called My Fair Lady, which I found when I did a search for more Jung ll Woo shows. In this one Woo is a rich young man who has shed his parents money and position and become a lawyer helping the poor. Although his darling smile is enough to knock any woman over, it was his incredible clothing and the way he wore it that was riveting. His suits! His shirts! They were beyond clean. his shirts were pressed so perfectly as if they were ironed onto him. How can one describe perfection in a mans shirt?  it was like watching a double rainbow in the sky...when you see it and you gasp in disbelief, and you want to remember it exactly, paint it, photograph it, it is that mind blowing. That is the way Jung ll Woo and his My Fair Lady wardrobe struck me.  There are often long, lingering camera shots of his boots, only the cuff of his trousers and the boots visible on the screen. And he was a wonderful enough actor to go from being a total show stealer to being second fiddle in My Fair Lady. Yoon Sang Hyun was who you root for in this one. What is delicious about Korean TV is that it is so deeply different than American... The characters are often weird, weird to the point of being momentarily unattractive...oddballs. A regular line from Korean TV is "I'm going crazy" said by the main stars often. Yoon Sang Hyun starts out as an almost lowlife sort of fellow who gets rich women to give him money, and ends up the most endearing character on the show. He laughs too loudly, he shouts a lot (but everyone shouts on Korean soaps), he is often not your typical movie star face, but his personality and humor quickly change all the rules and he remains with you long after the 20 episodes, watched non stop over 3 days, are over.
     Yes, there are similarities in all TV dramas.... usually the beautiful woman is incredibly rich. Or the handsome young man is incredibly rich. Usually it runs like a bodice ripper paperback, she rejects him; he wants  her more. She rejects him. He's desperate for her. She finally sees the light; he misunderstands and leaves. etc etc, until they finally get together in the end. The differences are what make Korean soaps worth watching. They still see men as macho and women as fragile small and beautiful. Women fall apart. Men carry them. It's true the men are always grabbing the girls roughly by the wrist and forcing them to go out for dinner, or accept a ride home in their sports car. It's true that the girl is under the protection (thumb) of her father, or uncle and later gets to be under that same umbrella with her new man. The women are often terrible to one another, saying awful things about the others looks. Or their hair, or their clothing. And when they are feeling happy they admit to being more beautiful than Miss Korea. 
But mostly they are NOT happy. Mostly they weep and frown and run. Or they take long walks in snowy weather, or wander through shade trees along a leaf strew path. 
Why, if all this is true, am I obsessed with Korean TV?  Watching it means sitting and keeping your eyes glued to the screen every second because the subtitles swing by so quickly you might miss some tragic admission or a hilarious remark. Like my new favorite, Hyun Bin, in Secret Garden, when he says to the adorable stunt director, "I didn't realize Arabic people were so agile.." which isn't exactly what he said but I can't remember the exact remark. His character was endlessly awkward, Often hilarious. Secret Garden is one of the funniest shows I have ever cried through.  Yoon Sang-hyun is in it as well, as a pop star, and Lee Philip plays the adorable stuntman director, all vying for the same darling girl. And each one of them is too wonderful. How can the leading girl choose? But it is the oddball Hyun Bin's personality and almost unintentional humor that wins the audience (me) over. He may be one of the GREAT actors of the time. His timing is perfect. His awful clothes are perfect. ("Do you know how much this cost?" he demands when the leading girl makes fun of his sparkly running suit.)  You would never see anything so daring on western television as the leading guy dressing consistently like an idiot. But on Korean drama, he has the room to become cherished for an entire self, not just the outer shell we get over here. And yet I am describing the outer shell of these characters when I rave on about their clothing. It is a paradox, is it not?
In the saddest episode (number 19 out of 20), Hyun Bin and his darling girl go to her fathers grave which is a wall of little boxes with peoples remains in them. Sad music is playing in the background as it always is. The audience has been crying for 15 minutes over the cute girls father dying in an elevator and the oddball hero getting his memory back. The audience is still weeping when Hyun Bin lays the flower bouquet down on the father's box, and the camera lingers on the delicate flowers and greenery and bubble wrap..... that is when you are jolted back to realizing how strange it is to be watching Korean TV. Bubble wrap in a sorrowful funeral scene?
     And then there are the date questions that are asked over dinner... what is your astrological sign? What is the year or animal of your birth? and what is your blood type?  The first time I heard that, I swooned in admiration. What a great idea, to ask such an obscure question. And how odd that they all know the answer. I don't know my blood type. And in Lost, I remember, when Jack is dying from appendicitis and they have to give him a transfusion with a bamboo shoot, no one can help because they don't know their own blood types. Ok, maybe it was Shannon's brother who was dying from falling off a cliff and Jack was trying to save him with a transfusion but the point is, who knows their blood type? Actually Lost is where I first started getting interested in Korean Culture. They had a Korean couple on Lost who were always saying "Ani!" or "Ani Jay!" which means no or yes, I think, depending on how you say it. 
     The best thing about these shows is that they are about love and falling in love and yet there is no graphic sex scenes or even any partial nudity and only a VERY occasional kiss. The warmth and intimacy coming from a single hug is sufficient. Western movies and shows could learn a lot from that. In fact, American TV could learn a lot from these wonderfully written though maudlin dramas in general. There is a politeness in these series. The younger people defer to the older. The older you are the more respect you seem to get. That is kind of the opposite in the United States. In every Korean drama there is one cherished older man called "Oppa" which sounds like "Papa". It is a cozy familial address, though I am not sure exactly what it means. Older Brother, maybe. Once, a charming girl was horrified that her boyfriend had dropped the polite words with her. Or maybe he was upset at her, I don't recall which, it's funny how the details of these shows sort of instantly blur, anyway one of them said, "What!? Why did you drop the Honorifics with me??" What an awesome, heady word. What a great unusual line. What an amazing world is out there, beyond my world. And what a peculiar obsession I have...reading subtitles and crying watching Korean TV. 

To Turn Time Back to What I Had

              Memories of my mother, the poet Ruth Stone 1915-2011

Mother died. I have to say that. Not as a reminder, but simply because it is the largest thought occupying my brain. Mother died and Mother died.

         I took the subway into Manhattan. That’s the first thing I remember doing after watching my mother die. It was the day after, and my computer had died like a tribute to my mother. I headed to the Apple Store. While waiting for the subway, a grubby man sidled up and spit right near me. Rats ran along the rails below where I stood- and when the train came, the Q train squealing into the Beverly Road Station, I got on and had to stand next to a pervert who fell against me repeatedly whenever the train lurched.

         The Apple boy who checked my Mac pronounced the hard-drive dead. I staggered out of the store. By the way, the little dog who lived with my mother also died a few hours after she died. Why should the grim reaper waste an extra trip? Not to mention every little issue, but my daughter’s cat also died during a routine operation the same day as my mother died. Well. Before getting back on the Q train, I betook myself to Starbucks to partake of a coffee and their bathroom, and therein a person in the next stall was vomiting and vomiting and vomiting while I peed reluctantly. Mother is dead, said my brain. And the bathroom resounded with retching.

That night, I dreamed a Christian right wing woman was shouting at me, “Murder! Murder! Abortion is murder!” I also dreamed my mother answered the phone. “I’m not really dead,” she said. I started crying with relief and woke myself up. Mother died, my brain reminded me. Shut up, I said.

         A few days passed. My sister called and cried. Mother was still lying in the same bed in the house where she had spent the last two years of her life, wrapped in a shroud and beginning to decompose I imagined. “We’re trying to get papers to bury Mother in Goshen, on her own land,” my sister said.

         “Why? Why?” Oh, said my brain, haven’t you heard? Your mother is dead.

         A week passed. A family member built the coffin and hired a backhoe and they put Mother to rest finally, out by the raspberry bushes behind where the old barn had stood before it caved in.  “That awful friend of Leo’s destroyed it,” Mother had often said. “Remember? He didn’t know the first thing about foundations.”

But now she is buried there. And Mother is dead.

                                     2...   Cliff Notes

        

Last night I lay in bed unable to sleep. When I would drift off, a terrible knowledge would wake me. Like the night the dog fell over the cliff out back, beyond the yard. Actually the cliff is behind the playhouse and storage shed. And in the 27 years I lived there raising my children, no one had ever fallen or ventured there. It was a blizzard that afternoon, and I had let the little Lhasa Apso out to pee in the yard. She was old and blind and never went far beyond the front porch. Mother by that time was also old and blind and things had gone badly between us, unmentionable things, and I was, how shall I say it, utterly lonely. The dog and I just waited for things to change, or for God to grab us. The blizzard was silent. It was such deep snow that for the first time I was afraid to go out back and feed the birds. I sank waist deep when I tried. Maybe that was how the dog got back there. Maybe she followed me. But there were no tracks.

     I was inside, sitting glumly by the wood stove, drawing, when I heard a barking and then a howling. It was unlike my dog but still, I thought, is that a dog? Out there? In this? And then I realized she was not on the porch waiting to be let in.

      My mother has a poem about her uncle Cal, some long ago southern family connection from her life before she became Mother. In the poem, his wife is severe and runs the house with that peculiar power wives can sometimes have in the southern states, and the last line is, “Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch, waiting to be let in…”

     Poor Mother is dead. Poor me. Her poetry knocks the stuffing out of me as it travels across my brain, making it’s way to the vast nothingness where all my uncalled thoughts are stored. Mother often wrote about her southern relations, who lived in Virginia and had names like Uncle Cal and Aunt Maude. One poem about Aunt Olla, which Mother would often recite at her poetry readings, described a turn-of-the-century woman. Words like “camphor” and “ginger beer” and “portico” come to mind when remembering her poem of Aunt Olla. The last line has run a groove in my memory and repeats itself over and over; “and all her pets were cats.”

     Mother’s poetry tumbles within me, ominous, disconnected. Fragments of lines jumbled together, they make a Parshah Ruth of sayings to be remembered. They are eternal wisdoms.

“Oh weep my daughters and have you heard?”

“The pretty tinsel of it,”

“I feel your coat, I smell your clothes, your tobacco; you almost touch me.”

“Uncle Cal, waiting to be let in…”  But that is the line which made me think of the blizzard- and how I somehow knew finding the dog would be a dangerous mission, I might not make it back to the house, I might be buried in the blizzard snow drifts, like the group of mountain climbers in Mothers poem…where in the last line they are waving and waving to a helicopter that cannot get to them, until they are “blotted out by snow”.

     So I put on two sweaters, my warmest coat, a pair of big sweat pants over my jeans, two pairs of socks and my boots and a hat and scarf and mittens over gloves, and went out into the blowing snow calling my little dog who was partly deaf.  It was almost as if I knew what had happened.  I headed straight for the back yard, calling out “Niente! Niente!” which is Italian for “Nothing! Nothing!” I had named her during the existential period of my life which later became a religious experience.

      I heard her cry a long way off, and still in that thread of knowing, I plodded through deep snow to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the swirling white. I could hear her down there, though I could not see her. It was steep and I could see no way back up once I began sliding down. I had some crackers in my pocket. I could eat snow. I had a small blanket, too. I sat down and began to slide as slowly as possible, but the pitch was severe and I tumbled down, down, down, like a last line in a poem, reaching a powerful ending- crotch high snow and thorny bramble bushes- the dog whimpered near me. There she was, an enormous snowball… bound up and immobile in packed ice balls and matted fur, invisible until I was almost on top of her. I tried to pick her up but she was so enormous with the added ice that it was nearly impossible. But I did pick her up, after freeing her from the deep drift and making the blanket a sling, I carried and dragged her along the edge of the shelf, careful not to get near the next drop down… and by pulling myself up inch by inch holding on to the little saplings, I saved us both. At the steepest moments, I had to lunge forward, almost throwing her a foot or two above me, and then crawl up to her, pick her up and heave her another few feet ahead as it was not possible to carry her and crawl upward at the same time. It took 3 hours to get back to our house and by the time we got inside she was nearly lifeless. The yard had grown dark and shadowy. Just getting my boots off I remember took so long. Everything about us was stiff and frozen and my skin when it finally stopped being the temperature of icicles, still did not react to the warmth. When I touched my arm I remember being surprised that it did not feel like my skin.

     All night long, with scissors and patience that comes from battling the supernal, I cut off the ice from my little dog. And hour after hour she lay bound as if by ropes and let me cut away until she emerged from a sea of ice and matted fur and pools of melted snow around us on the cold floor of the kitchen. She licked me, and looked long at me… and then we both curled up together in the feather bed upstairs and the fire hissed with wet logs and we slept until the blizzard went away.

    

                  Epilogue on the Dog….

When I began describing to Mother on the phone what happened, she cried out “Ohh is the little dog dead???” and I said,

 “No! No, I saved her. I want to tell you what happened…”

Mother and I spoke 5 or more times a day, reporting our every move and reading each other our latest poem or story. We often bickered and hung up, but within a few minutes we would be talking again about something else.

“Oh God! He’s all right isn’t he??? Poor little thing.. he loves you so much…poor little..”

“It’s a girl, Mother. Jesus, you always call her a boy and when I had a boy dog you called him she for 10 years.”

                                    3…The Car

         Did I mention that I did not go to my mother’s burial? Well, then I will say so. I did not attend the burial of my mother. I can’t say why. I can’t explain. It is all part of the giant bloated balloon that cannot be discussed. It has to be enough to say, Mother is dead. After she died I went back to Brooklyn. I wrung my hands and sat on the floor in my stockinged feet crying and not crying. I played solitaire when my brain brought up things too terrible. I spoke on the phone to my sister. On two different afternoons my neighbors brought me food to eat.

     “What am I doing, Mommy?” I asked myself. “Daddy, what is this?”

     “You’re sitting Shiva,” they said.

     When a week had passed I got in my car which sounded like it too was screaming, and took the BQE toward route 87. But by the time I was passing Williamsburg the car was howling in pain, grinding metal to metal. I pulled off on Humboldt, and there in the midst and mist of the residential streets was a gas station glowing with a red sign… “Repair! Repair!”  Since I had been studying Hebrew for the past few months all I could think was that the word ‘repair’ in Judaism is a religious reference meaning, ‘repair of the world’.

I pulled in and a cute young man came out.

“Something is amiss,” I said. “I think I need brake fluid.” But I did not need brake fluid. He peered into the front tires and announced my brakes were gone. The calipers were ruined.

He was a sweet young man. He explained what calipers do and I cried and begged for mercy. He called another garage and discussed parts and then sat me in his office and told me about his wife and family while another man began working on my old Subaru. “They have bad hearts,” he said to me. “They are bad people. They offer me other women. My wife has left me. By the way, my name is Elmar.” He was very sweet. Every so often the big guy working on my car would call out in Spanish and complain to Elmar.  “Your axel’s are gone,” Elmar related to me, sadly, swiveling in his office chair.

“What!? I can’t afford it! I have no more! I have nothing left!” I cried. “My mother died… I’m going to the funeral…” This was not really true. I was going to have my own sort of funeral. No, not my own, God forbid, I mean the one I planned to have to say goodbye to my mother, my best friend, my heroine poet.

Elmar told me he was from the Dominican Republic. “I don’t even know where that is,” I admitted. My narrow world was writing; poetry, fiction, religion, philosophy.

“My wife, she likes to drink and party,” Elmar went on. “Always wants to go out. I am a man who likes to be with his family.” He was young and sweet and very handsome and I did not believe him. But I let him describe the man he longed to be, as we all do in our anguish. We all try to hide our faults- like how I hated Mother asking me about my pets- as if that was all we had left to say in the last five years-

“How’s your cat? How’s Russell the cat?” Oh God, how hard it is to accept forever Mommy gone.

“You must come back in one week and get the other caliper and discs fixed. You must get two new axels in a week, do you hear me?” Elmar stood by my car. It was back out in the parking lot and idling, no longer squealing.

“Here is my card,” he said. 

         “You are an angel,” I said. “Thank you dear heart,” I said. I heard my mother in my voice. She always had lousy cars… she was always grateful to mechanics.    

         “Be careful. Drive slowly.” I heard my mother in Elmar’s voice too. She worried about me driving.

         “I will. I will see you again soon,” I promised. “Good bye. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.”

         My mother and I once planned a trip to Europe together. She wanted to go so much. Her life in England with my father had been cut short by his death. They had been about to go to Paris together. “Gee, I wish I could see Paris. Walter and I had tickets. We were going to go, we were just about to… when he went and did what he did…” Mother would say. I decided it was up to me to take her there but her fear of getting on an airplane was too powerful. I worked on her about it for a long time, telling her stories of my then recent trip to Europe, until she finally agreed to go. We reserved tickets to France and packed our suitcases in the spring and left in the car one evening from Bloomington Indiana to drive to Chicago’s airport. I think we left Coalie with the guy who lived next door to us. He admired Mother and he once made a movie of her reciting Orchard, only instead of filming her reading it, he had horses running around in fields while her voice recited the poem. It kind of looked ridiculous but we liked him and I think that’s where we left the animals.

         Mother never had a good car. They were always old and banged up with a door that wouldn’t open on the passengers side and I think this one may have been the old Valiant she named Violet Hunt. It was not a reliable car. Cars were often unreliable back then- this was in the 1970’s and I was in my 20’s. Mother was in her 60’s and teaching at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, along with Willis Barnstone and Sandra Gilbert. Allen Ginsburg often was on campus giving a reading or playing his squeeze box in the park.

     We drove through Indiana, and into Illinois, and our excitement began to die down. It got dark and Mother, who had been writing a poem on a napkin while she gripped the steering wheel, had to quit writing because there wasn’t enough light. And out of the blue Violet Hunt banged and clunked and lost power. Mother pulled over to the shoulder and we got out. We were in the middle of nowhere it seemed.

         “Help!” Mother yelled, waving her arms. A truck pulled over instantly. Mother never had to wait long for providence to deliver her assistance. The man offered us a ride but Mother talked him in to pushing us to the nearest town. Back then you could push a car with another vehicle without damaging it. Now they crumple up if they get bumped, but back then cars were made of stronger metals.

         “Here! Here!” Mother shouted out her window as we rolled toward a gas station. The truck driver went in with Mother and they got a mechanic to come out and look. “Thank you, dear,” said Mother to the trucker. “What’s your name?”

         “John.”

         “Thank you dear John. You’ve saved my life. If you hadn’t helped us I don’t know what would have happened…”

         I went into the gas station to get a soda and to find a bathroom. When I came out again, Mother had given him her address and a copy of her latest book of poetry and John was wiping his eyes.

         “That’s all right dear heart,” she was saying. “You loved your mom and…and…and she knew that…you did all you could! Why look, you helped me! You’re a good person…” John was crying. I looked out into the dark emptiness that only those Midwest states can express, and knew we were not going to France.

         “Jesus, that was lucky,” Mother said after John drove away.

         The mechanic gave us a ride down the road to a shabby motel and said he’d pick us up the next day when he got the part we needed. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose that wheel while you were drivin’ ,”  he said.

         “Thank God,” Mother agreed.

         “Where are we?” I wanted to know. “Are we near Chicago?”

         “Chicago!” the mechanic laughed. “Oh no. Not even close. This is Paris, Illinois.”

         Mother, somehow the oddities and your powers always made a holy statement- as if our journey in Violet Hunt was created not to go to France but to go instead to the Muse, where on that napkin you would write the words that the world would later drink as if ambrosia, and we would swerve on into the dark of cornfields and tract houses and end up 150 miles from Chicago O’Hare Airport, vacationing together in a shabby motel in Paris, Illinois.

                           4…Anthologies and Collections

        

Mother has been dead just over three weeks but it feels like only a few days ago. In fact, the longer she is dead, the more immediate it becomes. The first week it seemed as if Mother had been dead for years. Week two became a bit unstable; a boat rocking; the ground where I stood, like a deck on a ship in a bit of wind.

         O.K. O.K., week the 3^rd, I hear Mother counting. All my life she counted up the women and the men.

         “56 men and 3 women,” she said. “3 women and one of them is Emily Dickenson which I don’t consider because she is always the token woman poet.” We were in the living room. The fireplace still worked then. We were sitting there. I was with her. I was always with her. In her lap was a new Anthology of American Poets in which she was not included, as usual. Or, 3 Centuries of Poets. Or, Poets of the 20^th Century. Or, Best Whatever Poetry. Mother and I sat there. I burned with rage at the world for not including her. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickenson, and no Ruth Stone?

         “Aw hell, I don’t care,” Mother would say. “Good ol’ boys club.” And she would pour herself another glass of wine and cry. Sometimes I raged and said I couldn’t believe they’d included so many lousy male poets and not my mother. And other times I would be affronted at how she counted up the men. It seemed she hated men. I could not see that hostile world yet. I was young and still visible.

         “Oh yes, here’s poem after poem of Robert Frost. The great poet of Vermont. Never a chance….”

My mother’s happiness took precedence over mine.  She told me she could prevent bad things from happening. That she could see the future. That she could look in to people. “Don’t you know who I am?” she asked.

         Mother promised she would live forever and that she would be here for the end of the world. I hated her as much as I could, which was fierce and brief and lasted no more than an hour. And I loved her eternally and above all, self included.

         “83 male poets and 5 women,” she’d say, opening another book she’d been sent in the mail. And why, I wonder, did these publishers always remember to send her a book yet forget to include her?  

         “Oh him!” Mother would say, looking at the editor of the collection. “That little martinet! Augh!”

         “Why? What do you mean?” I wanted to know.

         “Oh he was a small vain arrogant little weasel. He never liked me. Shoot, he’s left me out of every publication he’s ever done. And you know why? Because when Walter and I were at Harvard he tried desperately to get a teaching job there but they wouldn’t have him. Hell, we had nothing to do with it! But he’s spiteful and…jealous…and he can’t write.”

         One of the fun moments in my otherwise lonely existence was when Mother got talkative, usually over a collection of poetry. I would stand in the room laughing at her descriptions of editors. “They’re all men who wanted to write but couldn’t so they compile these giant dull tombs of male poets, most of them dead so they don’t have to feel jealous. And they add Emily Dickenson to represent all the women.”

         When I remember my life with my mother, I remember the living room as being cold, with the hot fire in the fireplace that burned you if you sat too close and was ineffectual if you sat back from it. I remember her nose.; she was always sniffing, like the sound a person makes when they are mostly finished crying. She would make a terribly funny comment and then sniff. I remember how everyone was comfortable around her. Even in chaos, she was like a queen at court. She was able to draw people to her, make them feel invaluable and yet in awe of her. She would reel off a hilarious poem so quickly you longed to hear it again. It stunned you. It was so brilliant. Yet she’d never even written it down. “Oh I forget when I wrote that. Silly, isn’t it?” she’d say. She knew something about everything. No matter what subject was brought up, she could tell the room some unknown bit of information about it.

She lay awake all night reading books on astronomy, mathematics, magic, old Victorian novels. She had mountains of poetry books stacked by her bed. She never turned the light off. She was awake when I went to bed and she’d already had her coffee and toast when I woke up. She could make up a bed for someone that was so cozy it felt like it was heaven. Anything she planted went wild growing and reproducing. Even the apple trees, so old that they fell over, kept producing apples from limbs attached to trunks no longer rooted in the ground.

         Our house was full of mice. She didn’t mind the cold. She rescued everything. She never killed. Not a spider or an ant. Her mind was usually elsewhere. She rarely talked to me when I was young. She never really accepted me as an equal when I was an adult. She still called me her baby when I was in my 50’s. It enraged me at times. It kills me now.

         She went through a Buddhist phase, hanging up little odd sayings on index cards around the house… “This is the moment! Here! Now! This is the moment! You are alive!”

         She manipulated psychology. She decided later in life that words couldn’t hurt her, which kept her from crying so much.

         She loved and mourned my father and wouldn’t let me mention him. She got mad if I missed him. She was jealous and saintly at the same time. She was flirtatious and repelled by sex…she wrote about it. Spiders, animals copulating, and yet the act seemed repulsive, base, when you read it in her poems. She reduced others to ash or lifted them out of it. She was complex, impossible, her fears and worrying drove her daughters mad. She cried for hours. She threatened. She gave without boundaries, gave enormously. She was an isolate. She was a narcissist.

         She made roast beef and carrots and potatoes that was delicious. She made spaghetti and garlic bread. She made scrambled eggs one night for Leslie Fiedler who had never heard of eating breakfast at midnight. She made tuna fish sandwiches and always decided they had botulism. She made liverwurst sandwiches with onions on them. She liked rye bread. She made egg salad. She gathered apple drops from the back yard and made heavenly apple sauce on the stove, the odor filling the house with joy, the sliced apples with their red skins still on, so sour and sweet. She made apple crisp when there was no food in the house. She never made pies. She never made regular meals. We might eat cooked broccoli and a baked potato for dinner and it was delicious. Her food was magical. The potato skins thick and crunchy and the broccoli perfect. There was something God-like in her cooking. She starved everyone in the house all day and when she gave the meal, sitting in front of the fire and discussing poetry, it had the added advantage of being eaten ravenously.

         She never cleaned for anyone. Her daughters cleaned when someone important was coming; Willis Barnstone or Henry Popkin or Donald Justice or Sandra Gilbert or whoever. She was above trying to impress anyone with a nice house. Her farmhouse was magical. It all ran on her secrets. The old dusty attic with the fuse box, treadle sewing machine, a century of New Yorker Magazines stacked on the stairs and along the eaves, boxes of Limoge china and antique kitchen utensils, and horsehair furniture.

         The water system was a hidden rite of spring. She would tromp through the maple woods in April to the spring to hook it up. I would yell when the faucets began to sputter with water pressure.

 The brook, the lilacs, the daffodils, the wild roses and wild asters and the apple blossoms. The back porch where we sat discussing art and writing with endless streams of students; kids from Urbana, Madison, Brandeis, Bloomington,- and the poets and scholars and teachers… bottles of wine and plates of cheese and a watermelon rolling in a pool in the brook to keep it cold. Oh Mother, how could you die and leave this, leave me like this, leave this all to die with you?

         Radcliffe, Brattle Street, Mr. Parker and Poochie and Coalie and George Harrison the cat. Gram.

         Mother, your Merimeko bedspreads! Your black and white sweater! Your blue work-shirts, your wheat jeans. Mother, your Pond’s Face Cream, your poems on every envelope, your mysterious absence even while you sat in some wicker chair recording the words you were whispered- that train roaring through you-

         Mother, the magical, the terrible, the longing that hungers within, aching and whining and waiting, always waiting for you to come back- to pick up a strange orange fruit and hold it in your hands which suddenly become delicate and thin… your voice saying, “Isn’t this persimmon beautiful?” in that time you became enthralled with Japanese culture. How the house reflected your passions; a Japanese tiger print and an oriental doll propped against the fireplace mantle; and you, discarding your blue shirt and jeans now entered the room in kimono, stood like an eggshell statue for a moment with your neck stretched long and your profile against the light and one hand extended; “My darlings!” you’d say. “Shall we eat that persimmon?”

                                                5…Readings

         Mother, dressed in her casual uniform of velvet blazer, corduroy pants, button-up blue mans shirt, and jaunty Beatle cap, arrived at every poetry reading carrying her canvas book bags and purse full of cough drops, glasses, Kleenex. Keys, envelopes with poems on them, pens, bills, and so on. Her book bags  contained manuscripts, anthologies, and her published books of poetry with page markers through-out. When introduced, Mother would stand at the podium and arrange her poems in front of her. “Is this water for me?” she would call out. 

         Someone would say, “Yes!”

         Mother would then ask that they turn off the light shining in her eyes; (there was always a spotlight or overhead light that bothered her) and the room would grow dim. “There! O.K., Now I can see!” she would say. The audience tittered. She would put on her glasses that we had stopped to buy on the way, still with the price tag dangling, and read Laundry or another opening poem. “Wait a minute. Something’s bothering me,” she said, and pushed the price tag away from her nose. “Huh-uh. Nope. What is that?” and the person who introduced her would rush to the stage and remove the tag from her glasses. “Whew! That’s better. I just pick these up at the dime store to enlarge the words,” she would say. The audience laughed. They loved her now. Now she could read them her poems and they would hear her.

     But Mother was never predictable. Just when one could assume that she would charm her audience with an innocent humor, she could be utterly straight forward and read without comment. These times I sat anguishing in the audience. She did this sometimes because she feared that people liked her performance and not the poetry. She wanted her poetry to be loved. She wanted to be able to read them without inflection or remark and have them carry the power.  And they did, without question. But her readings were overwhelming in their emotional highs and lows; weeping and laughing, exalted, and cowering beside a corpse, she would lull her audience into listening comfortably and then inoculate them with truth. At the end, they gathered around her literally for hours. When the other poets and faculty were gone, Mother would still be surrounded by people in the auditorium, signing books and giving advice often until well after midnight. Every audience, arriving stiff and chilly, would dissolve into passionate fans. I watched, as we traveled by car, by greyhound, by train, creeping across the country, enlightening and revealing. I carried my camera and she brought her canvas bags containing her words.

        

         Traveling by Greyhound with Mother was no fun. When she sat beside me on the bus, she refused to talk but became focused on the road and the driver. “Hey, he’s swerving!” she would say, clutching the arm rest.

         “No he isn’t. Can we go to the hotel after the reading instead of before? I wanted to go to Harvard Square first and get a lime rickey at that place we used to go to.”

         But Mother would ignore me. Instead, she would shout, “Hey, slow down! You’re scaring me!” to the bus driver.

         Once, I remember not traveling with her but picking her up at the other end of the journey. I got to the bus station out west somewhere and was waiting as the bus pulled in. She’d been traveling for 3 days. The doors opened and an enormous crowd got off, all with tears in their eyes and hugging my mother. “Good bye, my darlings!” she said.

         “Back up, step back please,” the bus driver called out as he climbed off with the keys to the luggage compartment.

         Mother turned to a large weeping woman and said, “You’re going to come see me now. You promised.”

         “Yes, I am, I just wish I could get there sooner is all…” the woman said, wiping her nose. Then the bus driver turned, and Mother said,

         “Now Bob, don’t be officious like your dad…” and he too hugged her, and  his eyes were full of tears.

          

                                    6…Metamorphosis

         Mother, I cannot sleep. I sing in my head to drive out the horror of you flailing your arms trying to breath. 

         I cannot sleep and I am not a dancer. I drag my feet through Mondays into Sundays and can’t remember even what dancing is…in fact, since you died, Mother, my mind is weirdly empty of all knowledge. Whatever I learned is now erased. Only split seconds remain.

         The way your mouth made an upside down U when I cried out, “I don’t want her to suffer!”

The day I didn’t come to have breakfast with you.

The letter you wrote me that I never received. Mother, what did it say? Where did we fail each other? How can it be, how can it be?

“Oh, you’re not going to let me read,” you said when every night I would sneak in to your room to turn off the light, years ago.  At 2 A.M. your bed was covered with volumes and tissues and a book open over your face. You looked like you had fallen asleep while cramming for an exam. But the minute I clicked the switch off, the book would lift from your face and you’d say,

“Oh you’re not letting me read!”

Now Mother, I too get up and read at 2 A.M., at 3, at 4. But I cannot retain the words. I read the lines but they do not reach my mind. They remain read on the page. They do not fly to thought. They are dormant, lifeless. My ears ring with a high consistent pitch. I see yet do not see. It is just as you wrote in Metamorphosis;

“Everything shimmers and glitters and shakes with unbearable longing;

The dancers who cannot sleep, and the sleepers who cannot dance.”

But I am neither dancer nor sleeper now. I lie down at night and fall asleep only to wake within minutes. My eyes fly open. I am holding my breath.

You loved New Yorker cartoons. You loved Leonard Bernstein, Lotta Lenya, Pete Fountain. Daffodils. Thurber. E B White.

You hated people calling you Ma’am or Lady. You hated styrofoam.

You danced the Charleston. You played piano when you felt like it, though you’d never been taught.

Mother, how could you let your dying be so terrible? Once dead, you were wrapped like a butterfly in a cocoon, a metamorphosis. Everything shakes with unbearable longing-  Mother, my only mother, your life chained me to a rock on an ocean of poetry, within which lay anguish and intensity and joy and hope, too. And yet, however many days dead, I cannot dance, Mother. And Mother, I cannot sleep. I cannot even find your death among all that is now erased.

                             
                              7…..Famous people

When I was in my 20’s and living with Mother at Bloomington, she announced to me that we were going to meet a famous man. Before I go on, I want to say he is among my favorite writers today and I have read and raved about his novels to everyone, Mother especially. But then, in 1974 or whenever it was, I did not know his work. Oh sure Mother had some of his books on her shelf, but I had never opened them.

         “Want to go with me tonight? I’m having dinner with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Mother said. I was sitting in the living room of our university apartment, writing a story about Robert Bly on my typewriter.

         “No thanks,” I said.

         “Oh come on,” Mother pleaded. “You’ll have fun. He’s a wonderful Jewish writer.”

         We drove to his hotel and met him at the door of his room. I remember going down in the elevator with him. Or did we just walk down a hall? He was very sweet. He had a kind way of speaking and a mild face. And he liked Mother. I have a vague memory of dinner, a bottle of wine, a nice restaurant, but really I cannot recall much else. I’m not sure why. I think I was still in the clouds over the Robert Bly reading, or maybe I was miffed about something. I know he had asked her out because he liked her poetry.

         “You really like my poetry? I’m…I’m honored. You know Walter was crazy about your writing…as am I.”

          And then he asked if she would translate something of his…maybe it was his poetry.

         “Oh you’re so sweet,” she said with admiration, “but I don’t know Yiddish…” Mother smiled shyly and they went on talking. Later, when they were parting he kissed her.

         “Wow, he really liked you,” I said. “Is he married?”

         I was always hoping Mother would find a replacement for my father, but she never wanted that. She remained true to Walter Stone. Or else she just didn’t want to be hurt again. It is not that she kept that private from me, it is just that since she didn’t know, I didn’t know either.

         Mother lived in Biblical places. I was 3 when she bought the farmhouse in the Land of Goshen, a little mountain community in Vermont, nestled below Mount Horred, which I suppose is a misspelling of Mount Horeb, another Biblical reference. We were all living at Vassar where my father was teaching when Mother won a prize for her poetry and she took me and snuck off to Vermont where we met up with a fat short real estate woman who showed us the Goshen property belonging to Mr. Blackwell. It cost 25 hundred dollars and had 6 acres, two houses, a barn, a brook, and an apple orchard. She bought it right there on the spot. My father was furious when he found out. But later he took the enormous sickle from the antique barn and began sickling the back yard. Mother collected the apple drops, they put beer bottles and watermelon in the brook pool, and each daughter chose a room to live in. The upstairs had a giant trap door that was hooked to the wall and could be lowered to shut it off from the downstairs. Mother told me it was to keep Mr. Blackwell’s daughter locked away from the boy she loved many years before.

         Once we had our summer home there, Mother began finding places for other writers in Vermont. But I think that was after we had sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth. After my father had died. It was after my father died that we moved to Middletown where the Wilber’s lived. Dick Wilber taught at Wesleyan. Sharley and mother would speak on the phone and get together for cocktails. Mother started drinking “Manhattans” on a regular basis. For years we had Maraschino cherries in the refrigerator and vermouth in the cupboard. I think they had all been very good friends when my father was alive, but after his death Mother was a single parent, a separate unit, and she felt awkward. Or she felt they felt awkward. She did not want to be Walter’s widow to her friends. And yet she was. But she was also her own Poet. Her first book, In an Iridescent Time came out the year my father died. The flap called her, “the poet Walter Stone’s widow”.  Later, when Richard Wilber wrote a blurb for her she asked him not to call her the poet’s widow. “I hate being called that,” she said. “It makes me feel strange. Am I not a poet?”

         One night in New York City after she gave a reading, we went out to a pub with Allen Ginsburg and E. L. Doctorow. Mother had spent the afternoon teaching a class with Maxine Kumin. I took photographs of them while they taught. I was fond of Maxine as she had been particularly kind to me when I was younger.  That night while Mother and Allen sat talking and drinking beer, I sat by E.L. Doctorow, whom Mother later praised highly to me. “Do you often travel with your mother?” he asked. “I do,” I said. “I take the photographs.” I could hear my mother talking about my father to Allen, and I could see their conversation had turned sad. They hugged good bye I think, although I can’t be sure. It seemed they behaved somewhat kindly toward each other. I know my mother was intimidated by the big male poets, but she managed to overcome it mostly. And certainly she knew them all well enough. But she felt left out often…left out of anthologies and opportunities and the general circle, not so much because she was Walter’s widow, but because she was a woman. Cocks and Mares, Male Gorilla’s, and many other poems she wrote reflect that feeling of the woman poet facing the “Good ol’ Boys” as she sometimes called them. But who knows what comes from conviction and what comes from wounds?

         When I was nine Mother took me to Breadloaf where she was having dinner with Robert Frost. We went to the barn, a giant building where they gave readings, and we sat in the front. When whatever was going on was finished, Robert Frost spoke long to Mother. Her conversations always seemed earth shattering, enormous, tragic, and urgent. When they were finished, he called me over to him and I stood down below, in his shadow. “You be good to your mother,” he said sternly to me. I remember that he was a giant and had white hair and was terrifying. I wonder if she had told him I was bad.

         Our property was only a few miles from Robert Frost’s place. Mother had a barn, too. I am without warning in the middle of a moment with her, seeing her at the end of our old barn sitting on a horsehair fainting couch, writing a poem. I was about seven. It was afternoon and the light was peeking through the pane-less windows and the slats between the barn board walls. She was way down at the other end from the big double barn doors. “Mommy?” I called. “What are you doing?” I was hungry and had been looking for her.

     “Don’t come in here, it’s dangerous!” she said. Piles of hand-hewn beams were stacked up on the floor beside wooden barrels; antique chairs dangled from wooden pegs on the walls. The giant sickle my father had used to cut the yard also hung there in the barn. I remember how he sickled first, and then got out the grass cutter and pushed it back and forth across the yard making a sweet clicking noise as it rolled along. My father had a bamboo chair he sat in with a holder built in to it for a drink, and he would cut the whole yard and then sit in his chair in the apple orchard and drink a bottle of Budweiser beer. He kept his beer bottles cold in the brook by our farmhouse and I would go with him and watch him take one out of the cold water. Mother moved the bamboo chair and ottoman from the living room into her Women’s Room three decades later. That was when she turned an upstairs bedroom into a study of women. It seemed the best she could do to exorcise my fathers ghost. If she could not forget him or even get over him, she could at least exclude him. And so, among the bookshelves she built herself filled with women authors, and the file cabinets of poetry, the bamboo chair and ottoman was placed. It filled with books and manuscripts and letters and was draped with a sweater or two. But Mother never sat in it.

     The walls of her Women’s Room were hung with my sister’s artwork, poems people had written while staying with Mother, photographs, pot-metal Victorian women statues on shelves, and some poster given to her which read,

        “Women are like bread dough. They will rise!”

It was her way of sweeping out the pain of my father. But along one wall, under the shelves of HD and Saffo and Alcott, were my father’s records. I would sneak in the room and sit by them, reading their titles. There were classical records, a Marlene Dietrich album, and Tubby the Tuba which my sister and I would listen to when we were little, back when Daddy was alive.

     Surely Mother knew she could not shut him out completely; his chair, his records, the hi fi he built, the odor of his clothing in the closet. Now, since Mother died, I have not gone home to where I grew up. The house, mostly emptied and my father’s chair gone, I could not go there. Nor to the apple orchard which flourished for my mother, or the porch where so many poems were written. One night when Donald Justice was visiting he read his poetry while I played guitar out on the front porch. And Mother sang. And yet, most nights were quiet. Mother would be tapping out a poem with her fingers- her voice reciting under her breath each line, testing it out. She would go over and over a certain part until it was right. It drove me crazy to hear her sometimes. Not her voice, but the odd tapping with her fingers is what bothered me. It was irregular, strange. It was as if a new rhythm were being created, or as if the ground were not solid at all, but utterly fluid, sinking and rising with the weird unearthly tapping of my mother at her roll-top desk, creating a poem.

Recently while taking the Ethan Allen to Vermont, I remembered when you and I took the train across the country all the way to Tuscon, Arizona where you taught a class and read poetry on a reservation for a week. You were in your late 40’s. I was 9. You were teaching at U of I then, where you wrote U of My.

“When my dog goes for a walk, I say avuncular! Attache! Williamsburg!

And he pees on the evergreens-“

It was my favorite poem at the time, a real crowd pleaser. When you read the last line,

“University! University of my dreams!” your head would lift, your long neck stretch in an elegant quizzical way, and the audience would cheer.

You wrote a lot of poems on the trip home from Arizona. You would take out a Bic pen and a spool notebook with a tan cover and write while I read or slept. You bought lined paper but you never stayed in the lines. You wrote Hebrew style, from right page to left. You wrote in circles, going sometimes 2 or 3 times around the parameter of the page. Your handwriting was often impossible for me to read. Some of your poems started in the middle of the notebook and went back ten pages to a grocery list where there was more room to finish. Your notebooks were always dime store variety, your pens ordinary. You sometimes drew little faces of Ruth. I loved your drawings. They pained me with their cute innocence. I often pitied you to the point of crying. It broke my heart to see you cry over my father, or over not getting in Poetry magazine, or because we were broke, or because Hawley Hathaway wanted to chop down your lilac bushes along the Goshen road.

         We fought a lot, even when I was very young. You would cry and slam your study door, then I would leave you notes in the kitchen propped against the dirty dishes, saying, “I’m sorry Mommy. I love you.” Which is all I ever say now.

         I’m sorry Mommy. I’m sorry I never could fix any of it- your shabby clothes, your old cars- I’m sorry you did not get a Pulitzer, a National Endowment, a McArthur, or a second chance at true love.

I’m sorry for not being able to wake the world in time. I love you now as always, imperfectly, wholeheartedly.

         I am most sorry that you lost your eyes. “I can’t see,” you said to me, every day. “Everything’s shimmery and blurry and…and…I can’t see anymore. I can’t read!”

     “I know. I know!” I would say. And I would hold my hands over my mouth in anguish and terror. I made CD’s for you to listen to. I brought you a CD player and got each of my children to record some work you liked. I read you Life with Father. But it did not comfort you. You only listened to them while I visited. Then when I left, you turned it off. For all I know you turned your back to all of it, and mourned.

         Mother, I recall your laughter. How we would laugh so much it nearly killed us, that is how you put it. Even when you lost so much, nearly everything. blind, mostly deaf, you rode with me to Goshen one day, so jolly about going up there. Oh Mother how I cannot bear to remember and yet cannot do aught but recall.

         Still, I remember your wisdom. “There is no choice among the voices of love. Even a carp sings.”

 You often said you loved Gerald Stern. And Maxine Kumin. And Galway Kinnell. And Robert Bly. You were jealous of Sylvia Plath. Not, you said, because of her poetry, but because Walter flirted with her at a party. You fought over that for days. But that is what you told me, I was not there. Was that in England? I don’t know. I only know you refused to go to the dinner they invited you to, and so there was no friendship between the Plath/Hughes and the Stones. A pity. It would have been a nice addition to a biography of you. But your intuitions and emotions barred you from joining the club. You circled the periphery like that wolverine you wrote about in In an Iridescent Time. Or like the tiger in Topography;

                           The tiger rasps as he breathes.

                                    His belly hangs low

                                    His jowls are bearded with ice.

                                    He sleeps alone.

                                    Ague and frost have stretched his lip to a grin.

                                    The ermines slip like shadows melting into stone.

         By the time I knew you, you were already a loner. But were you always that way? Oh Mother, my angel, my betrayer, I sit here in my little rented room with a canvas bag of photo’s of you and the steam heat hissing, and I know you will never come back. And who am I without you? And who is any daughter when her mother is gone? No longer a daughter, no longer someone’s child, I become an old orphan; one who no person will adopt at the age of nearly 60. I dream at night of the little dog who fell over the cliff, and I relive her death again and again. She got cancer. I had the vet put her to sleep. “You’re going to put the little dog to death?” you asked me. “He loves you…poor thing….”

         “She! She!” I shouted. “She’s dying! She can’t walk. She drags a tumor….”

         Now each night that dog comes to me and dies all over again. How the vet injected her. How she howled and howled. How I cried out,

 “Oh no!! Oh no!” and the vet said, “this never happened before….”

Mother, I will never get over my mistakes. But I want you to know I forgive you yours with me. No one should suffer endlessly for wrongs committed. “I was dumb,” you said, referring to not sending me to school. “I was afraid. I was ignorant. I wanted to keep you safe.”  Back then, in that world of a match girls luminous poverty, (Fairy Tales, Topography), you lived in a moment of horror and loss. All men went out and never came home. All children died. All houses burned to the ground. Nothing was safe or consistent. And so you kept the doors locked, the cats and Abigail inside, the dogs on leashes, the wine bottles on the kitchen floor, and the mice chewing without obstruction. You wrote. You cried. You did what you had to, in order to survive.

                 

                           8……….Era’s

         Born when the iceman still pulled a cart with his horse up the streets, Mother’s liberal intellectual ideals mixed with an air of flapper impetuousness. She danced the Charleston in the 1920’s. She watched men who had lost everything sell pencils on the streets during the depression. She bought apples from the homeless. And with the fifty cents for her high school lunch that her father who still had a job as a printer gave her, she bought herself a pair of beautiful shoes. She married her high school sweetheart. According to her best friend in high school who I went to visit some years ago, she had “John Clapp” written all over her notebooks. But when they had moved to the University of Illinois, and he was preventing her from writing poetry, she fell out of love with her husband. “He locked me in the basement once for writing poetry instead of cleaning the kitchen,” Mother often said. In Illinois she met Walter and divorced her husband. World War Two began. She married Walter when he was on leave. “That summer I was 24 in San Francisco, you and I. The whole summer was a cable car ride over the gold bay…”

         During the war, she worked on the Indianapolis Star where her father was a printer. She had to review photographs and film reels. She saw firsthand the horrors of the concentration camps and the terrible suffering. It traumatized her so that for the rest of her life, and mine, she could never forget it or get it out of her head.

         She was a girl who was traumatized often. The first time she ever saw a plane when she was little, someone said, “Better run home little girl or that plane’s going to fall on you.”  For that, she never would get on a plane through her whole life.

         Mother described the instantaneous love she felt for Walter and he for her on their first meeting in a soda shop. “We sat there together, drinking milkshakes, and when I left, Walter took my straw and kept it. He still had it when we married.”

         Walter was sent to the Aleutian Islands during the war. Before he sailed, he stopped somewhere, Chicago I think, and made a recording on a record for her and mailed it to her. Back in the 40’s, there were recording booths in the train stations for servicemen to send a spoken letter to their sweethearts. Walter’s recording to Ruth was the last part of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach;

                  Ah Love, let us be true

                  to one another! for the world which seems

                  to lie before us like a land of dreams…

I am not sure if I am allowed to quote the whole ending here or not. In any case,  it became the family poem. Mother recited it to her daughters, and to this day every child of mine knows it by heart, and why.

         When Walter returned from the war, they moved to Cambridge where he taught at Harvard and where Ruth had Phoebe. From there, they went back to Illinois, where I was born, and on to Poughkeepsie where Walter taught at Vassar. Some years ago, Mother and I went to Goshen and she gave me some of his books. I treasure the Keats, as I know he both loved and taught him, and it is full of his notes. It one of the very few things I have that belonged to him.

         He loved to buy books, and in England he purchased quite a few, though they did not come home with him, but with my mother and her little family, who sailed back alone on the Princess Mary ship. On board there were deck games, and one day there was a tea party for children in first class that my sister and I snuck in to. We carried our Nora Wellington dolls which we pinched there, all the way back to America, where a gathering of Walter’s friends stood at the pier, crying, when we sailed in to port.

 

Mother was so wounded by the loss of her friends. When my father died in England, they came to meet our boat, but according to my mother, they disappeared after that and we were quietly dropped from their lives.  She wrote about just that in Denouement:

You intimidated me. I was thrown into hell without a trial.

Guilty by default.  It was clear the murdered one was dead.

There were only two of us. But no one came to lead me away.

A hundred eyes looked in and saw me on fire.

We loved him, they said. Then they forgot.

After many years I knew who it was who had died.

Murderer, I whispered, you tricked me. 

         Anyway, what am I doing here? Am I trying to tell my mother’s history or my own? Am I writing an essay on her poetry? Am I trying to find my mother among the fragmented memories and lines and pictures torn from my photo albums? I wrote about my mother constantly through out my life. It was as if I was born to watch and record her life.  I wrote Prayer, a story published years ago in Footworks, Maria Gillan’s magazine. I wrote Tour De Mornings, about mother mothering her students while I stood by. I wrote The Summer the Porch Roof Fell In, almost taken by the New Yorker, but as it goes with me, was not.  The Summer the Porch Roof Fell In was about her Brandeis students meeting her Bloomington students, and the chaos that came of too many visitors to the old farmhouse. Mother on her porch, on chaise lounge, wine glass and book in hand. Students relaxing around her in wicker chairs, everyone excited and holding a manuscript. I lived in the woods in a little house and the sound of my electric typewriter could be heard echoing all the way to where Mother sat with her gang.

         “She likes that electric typewriter,” Mother explained to them. “I just use my old Royal.”

         Mommy where is your old royal now? Where is daddys?

         “Let that go, Abigail. It doesn’t matter.”

         “I have nothing that was yours. Nothing. Nothing.”

         “You have the combination of us. You are the result of our combination.”

         As it goes, memories and now stir together and I have to keep reminding myself not to put Mother in the present tense. And yet she is exactly that. How can a person disappear? Simply because she is not visible, doesn’t mean….

         Her students loved her not only because she was hilarious and brilliant and warm, but also because she was able to seize what they were trying to say in their work and bring it out by perfect editing and shaping. She appreciated, encouraged and helped them become what she saw they could become.

         Born before television was invented, my mothers cousin had a stereoptic machine and cards that when inserted showed up as 3d images. The cousin would only allow my mother (who was very little at the time) to look if she looked at ALL the cards. Most of the cards were beautiful scenes and my mother always wanted very much to look. But one of the sets of cards was of Jerusalem and the lepers outside the gates, and every time she got to these she would be overcome with horror. She often told me how these lepers had traumatized her childhood. She wrote them in to her poems, and climbed in to their anguish. (from The Excuse)

“But now I am among them. I too, am a leper, a warning.

 I hold out my crippled fingers; my voice flatters

Everyone who comes this way.  In the weeds of mourning,

Groaning, and gnashing, I display

Myself in malodorous comic wrappings and tatters,

In the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.”

   

She replaced her own horror of lepers with terrible stories of the holocaust that she related to me in brutal detail from my infancy on. The only difference between her cousin making Mother view the lepers while seeing the beautiful pictures, and Mother forcing me to hear the horrors of the Nazis, was that I did not receive the alternative as she did. So in a way I grew up without the beautiful, and saw only the tragic. But the price of greatness is high, all who knew her suffered to some extent, and what was said falls away, but what was written remains forever. Her great poems go on, in my head, on the page, the glory of her words outshines her little drawbacks.

        

     I was a child when you married me,

     a child I was when I married you,

     but I was a regular midwest child,

     and you were a Jew ... "

Her poetry, like her mind, was always fixated on the terrible and the beautiful. She mixed them together like pancakes and served them to whoever happened by. And you ate them, and you thanked her, and they were delicious because you were starving.

     My mother married her first husband, she says, because she was afraid that if she didn't he would die.

    "She had his name written all over her school books," Gertrude had told me. "She wrote Ruth Clapp all over everything ... she loved that man." But my mother maintained she never loved John Clapp. In fact, she said,

    "I hated him. I only married him to keep him from being run over by a train…"

     To understand my mother is to understand what is not comprehensible. I could tell you how her grandfather got run over by a train, and that somehow that must have traumatized her and related to her marrying John to keep him from getting run over. But in saying that, I am only relating how she explained it. "My grandfather got run over by a train on his way home from work ... grandmother used to worry so about him because he was nearly deaf, and he always walked the railroad tracks home ... and one day when he was walking, he didn't hear the train coming, and it hit him and killed him. It traumatized me terribly ... And ahh, that's why I married John." Mother would say this, and then in her unpredictable way, she would throw back her head, and laugh.

         She grew up on Julian Avenue, just a few doors down from her best friend Gertrude. It was an ordinary street with medium size houses and small yards, a modest neighborhood probably built up around the turn of the century. But when Mother described it, it took on huge and frightening shadows of pre modern existence.

      “When pneumonia swept through the neighborhood, you could hear the screams of the families when they lost someone. The little boy who lived next door to us succumbed to it. And we heard a great wail rise up from his mother and siblings when he died. Oh, it was awful. I’ll never forget it.”

         Mothers and their girls had an irreproducible relationship in that other world. There was a mutual longing and needing that ebbed and flowed but was quite consistent in it’s timing. In fact, all relationships had their deep basis that was quite unshakeable. When a daughter worried or felt low, she saw her mother.  Which brings me back to the beginning. I can never see my mother again.

And yet, even that is not completely true. I can see her in my head, walking that funny bold walk she had, mingled with shyness. How she wore the same clothes for years, not because we were so poor, but because she would find an outfit that felt comfortable to her and refuse to wear anything else. In the 1970’s it was her blue work shirt and tan corduroy pants. In the 1980’s it was a V neck sweater and jeans. In the 1990’s it was a long skirt or loose corduroys and a bulky sweater. It is odd but I cannot remember her shoes. I recall she liked boots. But I cannot remember her shoes in summer.

     Mother slept in the same bed as her mother when her mother got very old. We had brought her in to our lives around the time I was 9 and should have been in fourth grade. Or perhaps it was earlier…in any case, we traveled to Indiana and filled a U Haul truck with her furniture. I danced around the vehicle, excited to be watching something purposeful and important. Gram had her blue gray dress on and her little hat with a small veil, held on by a stick pin. She had told me stick pins were for when men tried something inappropriate on a young lady. “You just take the stick pin out of your hat and poke him with it,” she said.

      Mother rushed in saying, “Mom don’t say those things.” Then she turned to me and said, “It isn’t true,” But Gram’s eyes gleamed with intent and I was surprised that such a formidable fighter was within my old cranky grandmother.

     While Mother taught at Brandeis and Wellesley and we lived on Fountain Street in West Newton Mass., Gram started getting what Mother called, “hardening of the arteries.” Mother was terrified of it. It was to her the worst thing that could happen to a person, to lose their mind.

     “Where’s my toothpaste?” Gram would begin saying, wandering through the enormous house we had rented for the year. “Yoo hoo! Ruth? Where did my toothpaste go?” And because my two sisters went to school and had friends and went on dates and were rarely home, and because mother would teach or go absent to write a poem, Gram would invariably end up finding me wandering the dark hallways too, and she would corner me. “You stole my toothpaste,” she would say. I can’t remember what I would say in response, but I felt a strange strangling hysteria and I would snicker and run away. “Oh, I’m going off to the woods,” Gram would moan. I could hear her despair through out the second floor of the house. I would hide in my room, in my closet, laughing into my hands, horrified and amused and unhappy.

     That year Mother would invite her students over in the evenings and hold her class at our house. The Brandeis students were jolly and drank wine and read shocking poems, but the Wellsley students were proper and I had to be careful not to say anything to embarrass Mother when they came over.

     We had a stereo in the living room and I played Beatle records on it when Mother was not listening to Pete Fountain. She loved Pete Fountain. She also had Al Hirt records but she really loved Pete Fountain best. She also loved the song, Counting Flowers on the Wall which I think came out that year. She was wild over the actor Sidney Poitier. She bought and read stacks of books every week, mostly poetry but that is when she began devouring astronomy books. And every week-end we drove to Vermont. These trips were like picnics to me. We stopped at a country store on Route 103 each time and bought supplies. The owners were foreign and had two longhaired dachshunds just like our dog. “Ohh! You have come to see the coal pappies!” the woman said every time we walked in the door in the evening. “Here, here coal pappies!” and the dogs would run through the store barking with excitement. My sister and I laughed about that for years. I sat in the back seat of the old Rambler or Valiant, covered up with a blanket because there was never any heat in the car, my sister and mother in the front seat, heading over the mountains in the dark, eating snacks and laughing over the woman saying coal puppies. Our own dachshund was named Coalie by coincidence. Or maybe that is why I named him that. He had started out as my dog, as all the subsequent dogs did, and ended up being mothers dog. He traveled with us wherever we went, crossing the country many times. He didn’t take up any room in the usually crowded car, as he lay on the edge of the back of the front seat, with his long nose on Mother’s shoulder, while she drove. And he never lost his balance.

     While the dog lay balanced by Mother’s neck, and the heater was broken and the window often froze up so it was hard to see, Mother would become inspired by driving and rummage through her big black purse beside her, get out a pen and begin writing on whatever she had beside her in the car… many of her poems were started on the backs of envelopes, some on napkins. When we got to the foot of our mountain, we stopped again at the little red and white store where Bob Wizell would say in his odd accent, “Well Hellooooo Ruth….” And Mother let me fill a tiny brown paper bag full of penny candy. It was comforting to have this man always behind the counter when we walked in.  Of course if we didn’t start early enough the store would be closed, but otherwise Bob Wizell was there, and his wife was in back behind the meats counter. She was not nice like Bob. She snapped at me and never acted glad to see us. Bob was warm and male and he always seemed surprised when he saw us. “Well, helllooooo Ruth!” he said, spoken through his nose, spoken with genuine friendliness. It was almost as if my father were there, running the cash register inside a cozy little store in Forestdale Vermont.

     In fact, unlike my life, Mother made friends wherever she went. She was a natural. Everyone loved her. She could say anything, do anything, look disheveled or not, and people swarmed around her in admiration. She had a way of understanding, of secretive conspiratorial knowledge shared only with the other person and herself. “That’s all right…. That’s ok,” she would say warning them not to reveal what transpired in that instant I had turned away, “we understand each other…” and that other person, wiping away tears and shining from within, became a lifelong admirer of my mother. Even if they never saw her again, I could run in to them 30 years later and they would say “How’s your mother? She is one special lady. I’ll never forget how…” and I would have to nod and agree and say, “Yeah it’s true. She is.” Only now I say, “Yeah, it’s true. She Was.”

     In this way, she is not completely gone from me. I do still see her in a way. I see her through the eyes of the world, and I see her in my memories, and I see her also in our old home movies.

    

                           9.....Home Movies

        

     Mommy and Daddy were poets and fiction writers but they had other art forms too. Daddy was a bird watcher, with binoculars and bird records. He played the banjo and wrote funny songs. Mommy had an old grey steel movie camera. She carried it everywhere.

Time passes.  How goes it, Mother? I worry sometimes you know. Over the last four months I have poured through what little I have of you left. I have looked at old videos of you and I have been out ever searching for a job. Of course you might not know that. You might not know I was left without resource. That’s ok. You called yourself “neurotic” in the movies. “Oh I was so neurotic. I wouldn’t let you out of my sight… I couldn’t let you leave for fear something would happen to you…” you said repeatedly over the years.  In one old film of 1969, you are sitting on the screened porch steps, as you often did, while hippies and dogs walked back and forth in the yard. You are 55 or so, and look 25. You make your classic gestures; shy, bold, wistful, happy. You speak but we cannot hear what you are saying. I am awkward and stuffed in to a striped shirt and shorts. No one has any idea that time will pass and these images will be all that remain of our family. We stand and sit and try to look natural, but the little steel gray movie camera prevents that. You took that camera everywhere for years. As I later did with my VHS camera. By the time I went digital, you were old. I have a video of you in a kimono standing elegantly in the pathetic world of old age. You who loved your Goshen farmhouse, “Little Farm” you called it. I called it E-Farm when I was three. You who loved your 300 acre property where you dreamed of starting a poetry press…in all the years you owned it, you only were able to live there once. In 1975 you and I moved over there with my boyfriend, and you lived in the print shop with the letter press and I lived in the potato patch in a cabin with my boyfriend. You were so happy there, but we only stayed half a year, and then I left, anxious to marry and begin a life of my own, which I never really did. If only I had stayed, had devoted my life in earnest to you, rather than haphazardly. You who had lived among the things of your life, in this video you are standing in an apartment in a kimono reciting Metamorphosis for me. How we practiced your poems when you lost your eyesite. My impossible mother. My tragic hilarious wounded genius best friend …. I can do no more than admit I went no further. I tried to leave, again and again. And failed. Now my life is your memory. I am your tape recorder, your melodian, your old gray movie camera that captures swaying purple delphiniums astoundingly vibrant in your green golden yard. I will record what you say, I will hear your voice among the lost boxes of your work, among the spiral notebooks. Though I cannot touch what was already done by you and given to others to protect, I can be your voice in the present. I am your living will, your memory, your experience, here, in the gray world between then, and now forever lost.